"A lot of the illusions that I held dear, rugged individualism, individual freedoms, are coming back to bite us in the ass. It seems like getting rid of the gatekeepers gave us Trump as president, and in the same breath, in the same wind, gave us not wearing masks, and maybe gave us a huge unpleasant amount of overt racism."
Hats off to a man willing to admit he made a mistake.
I am a PJ fan and follower, but I am well aware that he has long been a naive idiot operating from a place of priviledge. He is well insulated from the pitfalls of the ideas he espouses, and it took an UNDENIABLE COLLAPSE into straight up Nazism for him to finally grasp it.
Luv ya Penn, but I ain't giving you any fucking medals
anyone who claims to be "a libertarian" should be forced to watch the libertarian convention which YOU KNOW none of them have ever seen in their lives.
check out the ideas your "party" pushes. real big brain stuff.
there's nothing wrong with freedom, but regulation is necessary. to say otherwise is either ignorance, stupidity, or malice.
Penn Gilette has always seemed to be driven by a level of honesty and compassion and valued the freedom to choose where to direct that compassion. I think earlier on he viewed other libertarians as having the same level of honest compassion as he does but over time it's become more and more clear that libertarians are overwhelmingly selfish rich white guys who don't want to be called Repuiblicans.
I mean in the early 2000s he was calling bullshit on the hysteria over the vaccine autism link saying the alternative of kids dying to preventable diseases is so much worse. He even gave the tenuous link a benefit of the doubt and accepted that even if they did cause autism,t he alternative is so much worse.
"I did not mean that Conservatives are generally stupid; I meant, that stupid persons are generally Conservative" - John Stuart Mill
Cool to see the meme applied to someone who genuinely went to clown college!
As a big fan of P&T, this is a major win.
Not to mention the veganism which is also closely related to rejecting fascism.
https://vegnews.com/magician-penn-jillette-goes-vegan-for-the-animals
(Full disclosure: I saw an interview where Penn says he went vegan for health and weight loss. But maybe he's evolved to animal liberation as well.)
The modern conservative is engaged in one of man's oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness.
John Kenneth Galbraith
I think Penn went there with a different mindset than those occupying the space now.
I've always considered myself a libertarian, but I'm coming to realize I need to find another word. I used to be able to explain that assholes were ruining the name, but now the assholes outnumber people like me by too much.
I think the real turning point was when Jo Jorgensen said, "It is not enough to be passively not racist, we must be actively anti-racist," and then she had to walk it back because the libertarian party was so fucking racist. Like, that's not even a political statement. It's a moral one, and it's one I agree with.
Then when the Libertarian Party changed their stance on abortion, I was done with them. I clung to the lowercase L label, but at this point it doesn't seem worth it anymore.
I just think the government should be limited to things that only the government can handle. Policing? Roads? Business regulations? Those are all things that can only be handled by the government. Restrictions on what kind of stove I can buy? Restrictions on what I can put in my body or how I dress or what my kids can read at school? Those are all bullshit.
I guess it helps that I align with Democrats on most of the major issues now, but I still won't consider myself a Democrat.
I considered myself a Libertarian for a few years. I was a disillusioned Republican during the George Bush days and Libertarianism really grew on me. I voted for Gary Johnson twice.
As I became more concerned about climate change, I could not see a viable Libertarian solution to it. Private business is more than happy to keep chugging away with fossil fuels until it's far too late.
For Libertarianism to work, these same private businesses need to do the right thing voluntarily. In Atlas Shrugged, those businessmen and women are doing what is right for their business and it just so happens to be what is right for everyone else, that isn't always the case. All too often, what is right for business goes against what is right for society. Once I realized this, everything unraveled for me.
So anyway, here I am, years later, voting for Democrats because I've got no other option as the GOP became more and more insane since I left.I got turned towards Libertanianism when I lived in Germany for a while and if you ever had you'd know why. Then I lived in Asia where it's the exact opposite and that turned me towards socialism. My point being is that there's definitely a golden mean to freedoms and any absolutist should be immediately ignored because they are objectively wrong.
Another massive W for Thought, the chief glory of mankind.
I still think the word libertarian should be reclaimed by the left. Fuck the ancaps who took it. Westerners are too scared of it, despite it originally meaning a socialist. Places where white peopl aren't the majority have no issue with the word. My Filipino family understand that liberty is just another word for freedom, but think socialism is just state communism. Socialists will never win against capitalist propaganda without violence. Too many people hate anarchists and "socialists" but are not at all afraid of the principles of anarchist socialism. It needs better branding, and the word libertarians was literally designed for that. And the ignorant western liberals believed them and hate the word libertarian because of it instead of being educated.
Penn Jillette is one of my favorite people to just listen to talk.
He has softened a lot over the years from the loud and in your face personality he was and talks a lot about some of his bad takes or moments in his career that we would play differently today.
He may just be a fucking juggler but sometimes he has cool shit to say :)
What if the government is like Reddit? We move to lemmy to get away from their influence and to have our own values.
Why does this not make sense when it comes to politics? Communities are captured by network effects. It's an uphill battle to make things right if the idiots have to be dragged along.
Even when it comes to racism, let people be racist somewhere. Let them live their miserable life while there is no need to waste resources on making them treat all humans with respect. However, unlike the North after the war, help those who are stuck with them, to get away.
Has he thoroughly rejected his former arguments about secondhand smoke? Wasn’t there an entire episode of BS! that claimed that secondhand smoke was essentially harmless, and bans on it were government overreach and hysteria?
I think there’s a clip of him talking about it somewhere that I saw on an episode of Knowing Better, but it was really mealy mouthed. I watched that show obsessively in high school and even then thought that was odd.
Cool
We need to start sending the youths to the last bastion of American education.
This clown school graduate is walking circles around the Harvard and Yale doctorates.
Good for him!
PRoblem is that it wasnt only his politics that were shit, it was a lot of his general opinions too.
good on the people harassing him for finally forcibly excavating his head from his ass, I guess.
Now do "progressives" that don't understand the importance of voting.
His name is Rebo.
